I watched The Holy Mountain and adored it.

That's the short version. Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1973 film doesn't behave like something made to be watched politely. It's a ceremony that escaped from its temple, stole a camera and somehow found enough money to build magnificent sets. It's vulgar, sacred, often funny and sometimes cruel, and it's completely certain that ordinary cinema is a minor administrative mistake.

There will be spoilers here. Then again, spoiling The Holy Mountain by describing its plot is like ruining a cathedral by mentioning that it contains chairs.

A film that enters like a ritual #

The story begins with a nameless Thief, played by Horácio Salinas, who resembles Christ and wanders through a world already drunk on religion, commerce, violence and spectacle. He eventually reaches a tower and meets the Alchemist, played by Jodorowsky himself. From there, the film gathers seven wealthy and morally deformed people, each associated with a planet, and sends the group toward a sacred mountain in search of immortality.

That sounds almost reasonable, but on screen reason has been asked to wait outside. Frogs restage conquest. Wax Christs become merchandise. Bodies turn into icons, icons turn into products, and products reveal themselves as tiny religions with excellent packaging. Jodorowsky places the world on an altar, paints it gold and then checks whether we're foolish enough to kneel.

The film screened out of competition at Cannes in 1973 and returned there in a restored presentation in 2006. Its visual design belongs to a period when a director could apparently respond to the question "Is this too much?" by requesting more birds, more geometric architecture and another occult ceremony before lunch. Rafael Corkidi's cinematography gives all of it a strange precision. The images are wild, but the frame is rarely careless, and that's one of the reasons the film is still so beautiful.

The occult symbolism #

I loved the occult symbolism because it shapes the entire journey. Alchemy, Tarot, astrology, Kabbalah, Christianity, Buddhism and Sufism meet inside the same cinematic laboratory. Some combinations illuminate one another. Others explode. Jodorowsky appears pleased with both results.

The Thief's transformation is openly alchemical. What is rejected as filth becomes gold, and material change becomes a rude, literal image of spiritual change. The pilgrims must burn money, abandon their private myths and submit to rituals designed to empty them of the identities that made them powerful. Their ascent is physical, but the mountain is also the old interior mountain: the place where vanity expects a throne and may instead find a mirror.

MoMA has linked the film to The Ascent of Mount Carmel, by Saint John of the Cross, and René Daumal's unfinished novel Mount Analogue. In that tradition, the pilgrimage is a disciplined stripping away of certainty, and the movie performs that discipline with naked bodies, planetary characters and enough visual blasphemy to make a committee faint.

Jodorowsky later said that the viewer should search through Tarot, alchemy and Kabbalah, then forget all of them and return to the world. I think that's the key. The symbols are doors, and we're supposed to pass through them instead of collecting them to decorate our intellectual living room.

Even color carries an argument. Jodorowsky described red as blood and life, while blue is receptive, restful and open like the sky. He also spoke about removing night and shadow from the film, putting mystery under full light. That choice is brilliant. Occult cinema often hides its mystery in darkness, while The Holy Mountain exposes everything beneath an almost indecent sun, and the mystery survives anyway.

Music for an initiation #

I adored the soundtrack. Jodorowsky composed the score with Ronald Frangipane and jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, and the result refuses to settle into a comfortable identity. Percussion, ritual voices, brass, sitar and orchestral eruptions make the music feel like another guide in the procession, walking beside the images with a knife and a bell.

The music knows when to be solemn and when solemnity has become ridiculous, which suits a film that is always balancing revelation and satire. A lesser score might have told us to admire the strangeness; this one takes part in it. At times it feels devotional. At others it sounds as if a jazz ensemble has been asked to perform during the collapse of organized reality.

ABKCO eventually restored the original analog master tapes for the soundtrack's first official release. Heard outside the film, these pieces have their own architecture. Inside it, they gain teeth, and the sound turns tableaux into rites and movement into initiation.

The joke at the summit #

The pilgrims finally climb the mountain expecting immortal masters and ultimate knowledge. What they find is a trick. The supposed sages are revealed as substitutes, the director enters the reality of the scene, and the camera pulls back to expose the crew. The sacred journey ends on a film set.

I don't read this as pure mockery. The ending says that no image, teacher, ritual or filmmaker should be allowed to imprison us inside a beautiful illusion forever, which doesn't make the climb worthless. Jodorowsky spends the entire movie building a temple, then opens a side door and tells us to go outside, and that saves wonder from becoming bureaucracy.

The satire still works too. The film attacks military power, consumer desire, industrial religion, fashionable rebellion and the market's talent for selling us replicas of whatever once frightened it. Jodorowsky said the film was also searching for truth and a new way of life, and he called that proposition positive.

I agree. Cynicism would have left the pilgrims staring at the empty table, while The Holy Mountain sends them back to life.

Why I loved it #

The film trusts images enough to let them stay dangerous. It doesn't explain every symbol, apologize for every excess or put a sensible guardrail around the sacred, and it manages to be lucid without being tame.

The soundtrack gives the pilgrimage a pulse, and the occult machinery is serious without losing its sense of humor. Most of all, I loved that the final act refuses to sell enlightenment as a product. After almost two hours of rituals, gold, planets and prophetic costumes, the greatest revelation is that we must wake up from the revelation. What a magnificent joke.

It's an optimistic joke, too. The film removes the masters from the summit but leaves us the mountain, and we can still climb, change, fail, laugh and return to the world with our eyes slightly less obedient than before.

Sources #

• The Holy Mountain, official film page, ABKCO Films

• The Holy Mountain, Festival de Cannes

• El Topo and La Montagne Sacrée press kit, Festival de Cannes

• Alejandro Jodorowsky The Holy Mountain, MoMA

• Alejandro Jodorowsky interview, Interview Magazine

• Where to begin with Alejandro Jodorowsky, BFI

• The Holy Mountain original motion picture soundtrack, ABKCO

• The Holy Mountain Blu-ray and 4K restoration notes, Arrow Films